Path of Exile has been growing a lot over the years in terms of content. This has been a pretty big problem for GGG, and the wider Path of Exile fanbase, as of late. That’s because on the whole the game is having problems keeping pace with all the content in terms of performance. This is a particular problem in Blight league, as the insistence on minion builds has been rather damning on performance due to the glut of models on-screen. Now at least, a new patch has mitigated some issues.
The 3.8.1b hotfix actually only really deals with one core issue, but the impact on the whole of this bug is pretty major. The issue stems from the way the client and server both process frame data when a frame is drawn for a scene. Part of drawing each frame involves applying various effects to it to complete the overall scene. The game would normally apply these effects at a consistent pace, but a bug in the code caused that not to be the case. Instead of normal operation, this bug caused the game to apply way too many effects on each frame, but only when the framerate dropped for any other reason. This would cause a multiplicative negative effect on performance.
GGG also dealt with some server-side issues by optimizing performance that should reduce CPU consumption on each instance, reducing the impact of various slowdowns.
You can read the full report here, and we should hopefully see performance improving after this patch today!
